I’ll never forget the day I started thinking about an Entrepreneur Program. September 2013, I was on location in Shreveport, LA and sitting in a boring apartment I’d tried to make feel like home. I’d put big sheets of paper on the walls and was bouncing around ideas of programs for ricRACK. An after school program. A repurposed fashion show…..etc

But the Entrepreneur program I thought about the most. I wanted to include a way of paying it forward and working for charities. I wanted to include product development, business marketing, and creative freedom. How do I roll all these into one? It took 4 years to work this out.

This week, on June 6, 2017, two boys, Ricky and Sylvester, sat in front of me and shared their dreams and their goals, and I had to hold back tears looking at the first members of our Entrepreneur Club.

Here’s how it works:

For every hour Ricky and Sylvester work on charitable products….we’re starting with comfort wear for the Ronald McDonald House….for every hour they sew on these projects, they bank hours to work on their own products, a 1:1 ratio.

They will come to us Mon-Thurs 330-630, and Saturday 12-3 for the next 6 weeks.

They will receive a bonus based on attendance, and a majority percentage of the sales.

We have 5 incredible mentors working with the guys in the program…..Nancy Zufall, Heidi Bayer, Karen Clark, Kris Anderson, and me, Alison Parker.

We will focus on sewing and construction Mon and Tues, product development on Wednesdays, Thursdays will be for marketing and business theory, and Saturdays will be their chance to review. That’s the first 3 weeks. The last 3 weeks we hope to be in the manufacturing and selling stage.

This is what we hope for anyway. This is a pilot program, and there will be kinks to work out. Dream it, do it.